P&G's Silicon Valley Ambassador Heads to Startup Endorse

Sonny Jandial Will Be Endorse's VP-Sales

Mobile-deals startup Endorse has landed Procter & Gamble's Silicon Valley ambassador to be its first head of sales.

Sonny Jandial is a well-known figure among startups seeking to partner with packaged goods marketers. As associate marketing director at P&G FutureWorks, he was tasked with bridging the physical and psychic distance between corporate headquarters in Cincinnati and venture-capital firms and startups in Silicon Valley. Instead of working out of a P&G office, he divided his time between the startups he worked with: typically five to 10 at any given time.

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Past P&G startup partners included Klout and Shazam, but Mr. Jandial had most recently been spending the bulk of his office hours in Palo Alto working at Shopkick, another mobile-deals player.

As VP-sales for Endorse, he'll be charged with pitching the product to CPGs. A nearly 20-year P&G veteran, Mr. Jandial has done numerous tours of duty within the company. As a brand manager, he worked on the launch of Swiffer more than 10 years ago.

The Endorse app works by offering deals for specific items, such as Hamburger Helper, which can be redeemed when users scan their receipts after purchase. When an item on the receipt matches the claimed deal, the user will have the savings paid into an account linked to PayPal. (Endorse generates revenue by charging a fee on top of the savings doled out to consumers.) The pitch to brands is that they can also get insight into shopper baskets and which products are being purchased together, which will help them to better target offers to users of the app.

Endorse won't say which CPGs it works with, but a look at the app shows offers from brands owned by the likes of PepsiCo, Kraft and General Mills.

CEO Steven Carpenter said that Mr. Jandial was Endorse's first CPG industry contact and began working with the startup in his official P&G capacity in November 2010. He'll start the new role next week.

"Now that we have something brands want, it's important to have an external face of the company that can represent the CPG perspective," Mr. Carpenter said.

San Mateo-based Endorse now has 25 employees and has raised $4.2 million in a Series A round led by Accel Partners.

A P&G spokeswoman said in an email that Mr. Jandial's duties will be divided among three other FutureWorks team members in Silicon Valley.

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Cotton Delo

Cotton Delo is Advertising Age’s San Francisco bureau chief and covers digital media and technology. She reports on social-media companies like Facebook and Twitter, especially their product roadmap and pursuit of brand dollars. Before coming to Ad Age she was an editor at AOL and had previously worked at Patch, which she joined when it was a stealth-mode startup. She has a B.A. in English from Yale. Follow her on Twitter at @cottondelo.